Anki and Spaced Repetition

This allows for annotations on document and connecting flashcards to these
annotations and then synchronizing them directly to Anki.

Polar supports a robust annotation system internally with features like text
and highlights, and allowing comments and flashcards to be attached directly
to the text highlights.

This allows you to create flashcards but keep context associated with the
flashcards.

Deck mapping

By default Polar stores all Anki cards in the ‘Default’ deck.

You can change the deck per document by setting a tag with a ‘deck:’ prefix.

For example, if you want to store things in the ‘Technology’ deck you just
tag the document you’re reading as ‘deck:Technology’.

NOTE: In Polar versions prior to 1.8.0 we used a ‘deck per doc’ strategy where
a new deck was created per document. Not many users liked this and we removed
it in 1.8.0. Technically it’s still supported but needs to be re-enabled.

Setup

Install Anki Connect and restart Anki. At this point Polar can sync to Anki
properly.

International Users!

*IMPORTANT If you’re using an non-English version of Anki you have to
create note types for “Basic” and “Cloze” otherwise sync will fail. Changing
the language doesn’t re-create the note types unfortunately. We’re working
on a fix for this issue.

Usage

Once Anki Connect is running, go to Tools | Sync Flashcards to Anki from
within the Document Repository.

Limitations

Only front/back cards for now. We will implement more card types in the future.

No current ability to update flashcards. Polar currently lacks a flashcard
update UI so this needs to be added to Polar before we can implement this in
Anki sync.

Anki must have Anki Connect. This will always be a hard requirement but we
might create a Polar Sync plugin for Anki.

No support for nested decks. Each deck is created at the root. If you move it
the new deck will be created. We will have a fix for this in the future.

All flashcards are always sync’d each time. This is probably going to be slower
for larger decks but we plan to implement differential sync in the future.

Roadmap

We plan on eventually supporting the following features when creating flashcards:

Preserving the original context URL so that you can link into polar and
have it open the document direction

Storing additional fields in Anki including the name of the document,
original text content of the highlight, possibly images of the highlight
that the flashcard is bound to.